Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921 - 2011)

A US medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique. She was the second woman (the first being Gerty Cori), and the first US-born woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Gaining acceptance to the physics graduate program in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois was one of the many hurdles she had to overcome as a woman in her field. Powerful male figures controlled opportunities for training, recognition, promotion, and many aspects of development in the field of science, and especially physics.

When Yalow entered the university in September 1941, she was the only woman in the faculty, which comprised 400 professors and teaching assistants. She was the first woman in more than two decades to attend or teach at this engineering college. Yalow credited her position at the prestigious graduate school to the shortage of male candidates during World War II. Being surrounded by gifted men made her aware of a wider world in science. They recognized her talent, they encouraged her, and they supported her. They were in a position to help her succeed.

Yalow felt that other women in her field did not like her because of her ambition. Other women saw her curiosity as abandoning the only acceptable path for a woman in science at the time, becoming a high school science teacher, but Yalow wanted to be a physicist.

She married fellow student Aaron Yalow, the son of a rabbi, in June 1943. They had two children, and kept a kosher home. Throughout her career, she tended to shun feminist organizations, but still advocated for including more women in science. While she believed the reason she had certain opportunities in physics was because of the war, she thought that the reason that the number of women in the field decreased after the war due to a lack of interest. Yalow saw the feminist movement as a challenge to her traditional beliefs and thought that it encouraged women not to fulfill their duties to become mothers and wives.

Known for
Radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique

Find more
Wikipedia

Babes of science podcast, episode 9

Rosalyn Yalow: Assaying the unknown, in Modern Drug Discovery magazine